Headless browser
A browser that runs without a visible window, controlled entirely through code, and commonly used for automated testing and page rendering.
A headless browser is a real browser engine running without a visible user interface. It loads pages, executes JavaScript, and renders layouts exactly as code dictates, but draws no window. Chromium, and through it Puppeteer and Playwright, made headless operation mainstream: a single server can run many headless instances for automated test suites, screenshot and PDF generation, server-side rendering checks, and large-scale collection of publicly available pages, all without a display attached.
Headless mode trades realism for efficiency. A headless environment differs measurably from an ordinary desktop session: GPU-accelerated rendering may be absent or different, window and screen metrics can look unusual, and automation flags such as navigator.webdriver are often present. For CI pipelines testing your own application, none of that matters. For work where pages must render as a real user would see them, such as visual QA, ad verification, or fingerprint-sensitive research, a full headed browser is the more faithful instrument.
Oculr takes the headed path: profiles launch as full, visible browsers driven over raw CDP with no injected automation frameworks, so automated sessions behave like normal browsers because they are normal browsers.
